Predicting the Stone-Free Status of Percutaneous Nephrolithotomy With the Machine Learning System: Comparative Analysis With Guy’s Stone Score and the S.T.O.N.E Score System

Abstract

Purpose: The aim of the study was to use machine learning methods (MLMs) to predict the stone-free status after percutaneous nephrolithotomy (PCNL). We compared the performance of this system with Guy’s stone score and the S.T.O.N.E score system.Materials and Methods: Data from 222 patients (90 females, 41%) who underwent PCNL at our center were used. Twenty-six parameters, including individual variables, renal and stone factors, and surgical factors were used as input data for MLMs. We evaluated the efficacy of four different techniques: Lasso-logistic (LL), random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), and Naive Bayes. The model performance was evaluated using the area under the curve (AUC) and compared with that of Guy’s stone score and the S.T.O.N.E score system.Results: The overall stone-free rate was 50% (111/222). To predict the stone-free status, all receiver operating characteristic curves of the four MLMs were above the curve for Guy’s stone score. The AUCs of LL, RF, SVM, and Naive Bayes were 0.879, 0.803, 0.818, and 0.803, respectively. These values were higher than the AUC of Guy’s score system, 0.800. The accuracies of the MLMs (0.803% to 0.818%) were also superior to the S.T.O.N.E score system (0.788%). Among the MLMs, Lasso-logistic showed the most favorable AUC.Conclusion: Machine learning methods can predict the stone-free rate with AUCs not inferior to those of Guy’s stone score and the S.T.O.N.E score system.